geographical attachment

I generally don't get attached to places. Jess does. Like his mom, he learns to really love a place, to see its inner beauty, to see everything beautiful about a place. He finds an emotional connection with the places he lives and visits. It's a trait I admire really, the ability to love a place so much. While I generally enjoy new places, I customarily just take a mental and literal photo, and move on. I think it has something to do with one of my most unattractive qualities, impatience. Before I enjoy a place enough to become attached, I start tapping my foot with impatience, like, don't we have something to do other than fall in love with this tree?

My attachment is more to the memories, the people there. When we leave Durham in just a few weeks, I will miss the memories, the friends we've made, the unique time of life it was, what this place represents, not necessarily the place itself.

However, there is one place that has such a tender place in my heart, I don't even talk about it much. And I realize that much of this fondness has to do with the experience it represented as a whole, but I literally miss Japan so much sometimes that I ache. I miss the smells - curry, incense, and car exhaust all mixed up. I miss my hydrangeas, beautiful pops of color found around every corner, in the most unlikely urban landscapes. I miss the signs with extraordinarily bad, yet totally effective, English. I miss the quiet reverence of the people, their respect for one another and for their country. I miss the thick bread with super sweet jam from the dollar store. I miss the culture, the feeling of being soaked in wisdom just by walking down the street. I miss it all so much.

When we visited Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago, I spent considerable time thinking about that place I love so much. The cherry blossoms that bloom for a few weeks each year in March and April are a vibrant reminder of Japan. The trees were a gift to America from my adopted homeland in 1912 as a gesture of friendship and hospitality. They are simply beautiful - delicate and vibrant in all their slight shades of white and pink. If you stand in the right place, they blanket the sky with their blossoms (it isn't a coincidence that these blossoms symbolize clouds in Japan). And if I stood there long enough, I could pretend that I was in my Tokyo.

Oh, how I miss it.

 

I love a few things about this photo: 

(1) The photographer with two camera bodies around his neck and a backpack full of accessories 

(but as you'll see, he totes all this gear for good reason), and 

(2) The cute Japanese girls in the background. :)

Trying to snag a photo under these blossoms without other tourists crowding us out made Belle seriously bugged.

 

 See that strange black shape in the top right? Jess' lens. Funny.

And now for the main show:

 

I obviously couldn't choose just one. :)